'This Week' Transcript: Powell and Dudley

May 30, 2010

Page 13 of 14

ISSA: It's for either the attorney general using the special
prosecutor or the FBI to do the independent investigation, get the
on-the-record testimony from people such as President Clinton, now we
discover, and make a decision. It's not for members of the House,
Republican or Democrat, but it's also not for the White House to
whitewash their own actions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Matthew, the White House's explanation of this basically
is, there's no crime here, there's nothing unethical, it's politics as
usual. But does that hurt the Obama brand?

DOWD: Well, it is politics as usual. I don't think this should be
prosecuted. I think most people think this goes on every day. The only
question here is how competent they are in doing their politics. They
weren't even able to promise something -- an unpaid thing to get him out
of a race, so I don't know if that raises any degree of competence.

But I think this issue is -- is -- it is -- it is a political
issue. And it does hurt his brand, because he came to Washington and
said, "I'm going to change things. I'm going to do things differently.
I'm not going to be like Bush and Cheney. We're going to do a whole new
politics. We're going to bring people together. We're not going to do
all -- we're not going to politicize things."

And then all of a sudden, their excuse now in this thing, "Everybody
does it, so we do it." That's a problem for his brand.

TAPPER: George?

WILL: Politics is a transactional business. Candidates go to
voters and say, "You vote for me, I'll do this for you." That's what we
do in this business, and there's nothing wrong with it. That's called
democracy and free government.

Obama was seriously trying to act as the leader of his party to get
what he thought was the -- he was wrong -- to get the strongest
candidate in the race in Pennsylvania. Nothing the matter with this.
And the -- for Republicans, of all people, to try and resuscitate that
Frankenstein monster of the independent counsel is preposterous.

DOWD: And there -- the interesting thing to me about it, too, is if
they were successful, they would be faced with the fact that they'd
probably lose this race in the general election. If they had been
successful getting Sestak out, if Arlen Specter was the Democratic
nominee. Sestak is a much stronger Democratic nominee in the fall and
will likely keep the seat. That's what's funny. If they had been
successful, they probably would have lost the seat.

PAGE: And that's the marvelous irony of it all. I mean, the system
actually worked in this case. The question of whether Sestak was
actually offered or whether this was a trial balloon kind of floated in
a conversation -- hey, did you ever think about being on an unpaid
advisory position in the Obama administration? You know, that kind of
hair-splitting is what you would get down to if somebody really did try
to prosecute this case.

But what's really important here is that, you know, Obama gets
criticized just as much for not being political enough, for not being
hardball enough. Anybody who knows his biography knows that the very
first time he ran for office in Illinois, there was behind-the-scenes
work done to eliminate his competition from the ballot. It worked. He
got in.